Golang Unit Testing: Brief Guide and Best Practices

[matthawkins90]

I'm trying to teach myself Go.

Unit tests are highly valued for these projects. Unit tests are also a great way for new contributors to get familiar with a project, and can also serve as a form of documentation for how code works.

I think it would be a good idea to have a basic guide and "best practices" in the Contributing section of the dev docs, just to start collecting that knowledge there.

I'm thinking about having sections like:

• Example of how to run tests that are already there
• Example of how to run a specific test
• Best practices for writing good tests:
  • Table-driven tests
  • Subtests
• Measuring code coverage
• Finding areas of the codebase that need unit tests

I'm definitely not an expert on any of these topics, but I want to start aggregating information into a guide. I would welcome any tips or examples to follow from more experienced devs here!